Props

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The Good: Today I set out to find some baking supplies as I am thinking of doing something a little inspired by these adorable cupcakes to celebrate a certain someone's second birthday next week. I needed orange and black gel colouring, in particular. I didn't quite find those, but the little Phuong Ha shop on Ham Nghie in District 1 was full of other little treasures, like cans of Dr. Pepper (nearly $1 each, but yum!), peanutbutter baking chips (and the mini milk chocolate Hershey's Kisses), and dried cranberries. A good many of those packages of the chocolate chips had obviously melted and re-cooled, but I managed to find four packages that weren't solidified and now have a well-stocked freezer. The stores have a good selection of the Gerber Graduates toddler snacks as well, but I didn't pick up any of those. Know why?

Because I have a small stash of those in our shipment from Canada, and that shipment is in Saigon as I write this, clearing customs! Whee! I am quite cheered that we might actually be able to give Sadie her birthday gifts (the entire extended family shopped ahead and put her gifts in the shipment) ON her birthday.

The Bad: Chris let me know today that the Amazon order of books and NHL 2010 that we've been highly anticipating for a couple of months finally arrived at the DHL warehouse, but they won't deliver it because the waybill reads that the box contains some paperbacks and the aforementioned Playstation game, but the contents of the box has somehow changed to several dozen throw cushions. Huh?

The Somewhere-in-Between: I went downtown this morning to do some shopping for my husband, who also has birthday coming up. If I understand correctly, the particular item that I wanted to give him isn't yet available in Vietnam, outside of the black market and the fakes market. Hmm. I can't say that I've found myself in that sort of situation before.

One of the more amusing things to do while we're creeping along at a maximum of 30 kph in Saigon traffic is to watch out the window for the most outrageous item being transported on the backs the hundreds of motorcycle. Yesterday, Sadie and I were coming back home from lunch with Chris downtown, and we saw a man with at least half a dozen pink birdcages on the back of his bike, and an assortment of small colourful parrots and at least a couple parakeets inside them.

The bike was parked, so I've been wondering if the birds hop around when they are zooming around on the road, or if they are clinging to their perches for dear life!

I'm not sure what prompted me to pass my hand through the water I had filling up the drum of the washing machine at our rental house a few days ago; usually I set the water temperature gauge to cold if I'm washing our clothes or hot if I'm washing towels or cloth diapers, and go on adding detergent, filling the drum, etc. But I did feel the water on Monday morning, and it was decidedly cool even though i'd selected "hot" on the washing machine's control panel. After a bit of investigation and a few emails to our relocation agent, it was revealed that there was no hot water hooked up to the washing machine. Even though the machine had very clearly labeled settings for cold/warm/hot.

Cue another one of my oh-my-gosh-why-did-i-ever-move-to-Vietnam freak outs! I was washing an assortment of bed linens, towels, and pajamas that Sadie had puked all over the night before, and somehow, using decidedly-not-hot-water to sanitize the dirty laundry was just not going to do it. Thank goodness we haven't had head lice or pink eye or bed bugs or anything like that! I wonder what families here do if pink eye invades and they don't have hot water for washing?

Anyhow, I got over my shock/rage/freak-out quickly enough; getting hot water hooked up for my washing machine here only took about three hours and cost less than $100 (which our landlord declined to cover - much like she declined to follow through with the "have the house cleaned before we moved in and have the paint touched up" terms on our lease - she's a do-the-minimum sort of person, I guess). Sadie's diapers were properly laundered this afternoon. We're probably the only family with hot water for laundry on our block.

Well, would you look at that? Another entry for the "Things that Never Would Have Happened if We Still Lived in Canada" list - my pair of comfy Birkenstock sandals would not be covered with mold. Three colours of mold, actually. The same goes for two of my strollers. Darned humid climate. Our (rather irreplaceable) boxes of Christmas decorations were in the same room as the moldy Birks and Maclarens, and I spent a few hours today rather fearful that I'd be either tossing of cleaning those, but everything looks fungus-free, thankfully. I quickly re-organized a shelf in a more often climate-controlled part of this house for them to be stores in.

I also should update that Chris and I do have a pair of new credit cards now. I used mine to update my account with Vonage (very dear to my heart), and then it went straight into our safe, where it shall remain for who knows how long in this land of cash-only.

This is my third year living in SE Asia, and I don't really think about being a visible minority any longer. What is harder for me is being conspicious because of my seemingly strange foreign ways.

This past Sunday, Chris and I rounded up Madeline, popped Sadie into one her strollers, and and set off for a walk in our new neighbourhood in HCMC. I thought that we were just walking up the road and around the corner to the newly-opened Fanny's ice cream shop with the plastic toddler toys in the courtyard. Alas, I was wrong. Chris led our party of four up and down several roads. And I do mean road, since the sidewalks were nearly all unpassable due to being taken up with construction materials, motorcycle parking, and other obstacles. So we were walking on the road, pushing a stroller, and I was growing less comfortable with the situation as we continued on.

Why? Because there weren't any other people out on this road taking a walk. I felt very much conspicuous as the only family on foot on this road. It made me think that if locals were not strolling along on this street, then it probably wasn't a good one to do so on. I was worried that the sling bag on my back was going to be snatched, that a motorcycle would run into the stroller, etc.

I felt a lot better when Chris took us back towards home on a few side streets!

There is a list floating around in my head that is loosely titled "Things that Never Would Have Happened if We Still Lived in Canada." It's pretty much populated by events from the last three years that we spent in Thailand, but Vietnam has it's first entry now.

I was going to use my credit card to pay for Madeline's lunch fees at her new school, when I remembered that I couldn't do that. Because my credit card has been canceled. Why, you ask?

Well, let's start with a couple of facts. The cards expire at the end of this month. We updated our mailing address shortly before we moved, in mid-June. When I called to update our mailing address (which happens to be a forwarding address, operated by the company that Chris works for), the credit card company representative mentioned that our new cards should be in the mail shortly.

Shortly never arrived, and the end of the month was fast approaching. I called the credit card company again on Monday, asking about the cards that hadn't been delivered yet. The person that I spoke to on the phone explained a couple other important facts, like how they can't mail credit cards to PO Boxes (which is what we have) or to addresses that have been in their system for less than sixty days (which sucks for people who move close to when their cards expire, like us!).

In order for them to be able to send new cards to us directly here in Saigon (instead of our unuseable mailing address), our current credit cards had to be declared "Lost or Stolen". Arrrrgh.

We should have the new cards by the weekend; they're being couriered to Chris's office. In the meantime, I am slightly uncomfortable about not having a credit card to use in case of an emergency. Which is sort of funny because since I've moved here, I am usually worried that someone is going to steal it out of my bag. Go figure.